Journey To $100 Million

If you're like Erik then you likely have a lot of information about the company in your head that others in the company need to know about. Erik has written that information down in two separate documents. First, there's The Company Cheatsheet which is shared with all employees. It includes things like the company's pitch - what we say to people to explain what we do. It also includes out address, zip code, phone number (not everyone knows it), the number to our conference line, the WIFI password, and everyone's cell phone numbers. There's a second document named Corporation Information. It includes things like the company's EIN (employer identification number) aka taxpayer ID, where and how we register our domain name, our bank account numbers, and other important administrative data. That document is provided to a smaller group - Erik, Kevin, and Katya - those who need it. Make sure that you get as much information out of your head and into a document. Give your employees what they need so they don't n

When Erik was back in high school, he really really wanted a skateboard and they were $120 (for the late 80s, that’s pretty pricey) and he didn’t have that money. He’d always done paper routes and shoveled snow and cut grass around the neighborhood but that was money that kind of just came and went. He needed money that was set aside specifically for that purpose and that purpose only. So he started reselling Blow Pops - you know, those lollipops that have a big wad of gum in the middle. He bought a big bag and would sell three for a quarter and at that price, he was making good money. He did this for several months and sold them at school, raising the $150 to buy his skateboard. At the time, it was no big deal but in retrospect, the key is that he wanted something, came up with a plan, and executed that plan. It was one of those early signs of entrepreneurialism: if you set your mind to something, you can make a profit if you’re savvy enough to sell something that’s in demand and come out with happy custom

In this episode, Kevin provides a sales update. In the third quarter of the 2019, the company crushed their quarterly goal of $30,000 in new monthly recurring revenue by August. But in reality, there was a slowdown of sales activity and meetings in July, and that led to a slowdown of closings in September. Knowing that meetings lead to sales, and there is a time delay between the two, the company has added a new KPI to track new unique prospecting meetings. By tracking that, we'll have a leading indicator of how many sales we should expect to have based on the number of meetings we had previously. We cannot make people buy from us. All we can do is have as many meetings as possible to try to get in front of prospective clients and then eventually close them. Kevin is very confident with the sales process. But there will be ups and downs along the way. Right now we are tracking deals, closed deals, and new unique meetings as KPIs. As we grow, we are learning and tracking more data to help us project outc

For a long time, Erik has been charging an extra 3.5% when clients want to pay by credit card because of the extra expense of accepting a credit card. Only about 5% of clients opted for that payment option. But that meant that a lot of clients paid by check, but that lead to a delay in getting paid. He recently changed the policy due to a complaint from a new client who didn't want to pay the 3.5% fee. Although there's a clear provision in the contract that allowed the company to collect the fee, he decided to switch the paradigm to incentivize clients to pay the way they what them to pay - by ACH (automated clearing house). Now the company doesn't charge a 3.5% fee for credit cards. Instead they provide a discount if clients pay by ACH, and they don't accept checks except for from a few legacy clients. The extra expense of credit card fees will be offset by a planned increase in service fees in the new year. It's easy to brush off a complaint from a single client. But for every client that complains, the

Kevin recently attended a leadership workshop. One of the leadership styles he learned about was the coaching style. Coaches need to know when to draw the line between when to coach more and when to declare an employee is not the right fit. Core values help define who should come onto the team. If you make it onto the team then you exhibit the core values and you're coachable. We owe everyone in the company the opportunity to not only be coached, but to sometimes fail on their own so they continue to learn. — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups. — Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and

At Erik's last employer, the company explicitly forbid employees from freelancing. Many of the people at the company, Erik included, had a strong desire to freelance and thus were technically violating the company policy. What that meant was that many employees carried around two personas. The first persona was that of a loyal employee, and the second was that of a freelancer, but on the down low. It forced employees to sneak around, and they felt scared of getting caught for making a few extra bucks. Each freelance gig that Erik took on resulted in him actually getting better as an employee because he brought that experience back into the workplace. The skills he gained while freelancing made him a better at his job. When Erik started his company he decided to not play that game. He addressed the situation and explicitly allowed freelancing, and still allows it. There are caveats, but generally it's allowed. He believes freelancing is a good practice. A few employees do it, most don't, and it's fine a

Today Kevin discusses niching for a certain segmentation of the market. We've never been niched at Array Digital. Niching is when you focus very narrowly on a specific clientele or product. As an example of a niche, if you're a clothing company you may only create hats. Maybe just baseball hats. And that's it. Compare that to segmenting which would mean you make all types of baseball clothing - shirts, hats, etc. You've focused on the baseball segment. You may provide similar clothing for other segments such as for basketball. At Array Digital we work with lots of different types of clients, but we work mostly with B2C clients. As we've begun to segment we found we had a lot of clients in the following segments; medical, real estate, retail, and home services. We have a lot of experience in these areas, and they're becoming specializations. The question is, Should we segment for these specializations? Do you niche or segment? If so, let us know. — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer &

If you’re unsure what NPS is, it stands for Net Promoter Score and it’s used to gauge a company’s relationships with their clients. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research and is correlated with revenue growth. You ask every customer you have a simple question: “How likely would you be to refer us to a colleague or friend?” on a scale from 0-10. So what is a good NPS score? Well let’s give you a few examples: FexEx has a -9, CVS has a -10, and Apple is 47. Right now the highest NPS score that Kevin could find on the Internet is Costco with a score of 79. Anything over 70 is world-class. Today, Kevin updates you on our current NPS score. When we started, we had a negative score because we had a lot of hosting clients, clients we didn’t really interact with because we simply hosted their website. But we set a goal and kept increasing that goal as we hit and surpassed it each quarter. Our team has worked very hard to get that score up, particularly our project manager, Jamal

In this episode, Kevin talks about letting emotions drive business decisions. When Kevin meets with prospects or clients, sometimes he can tell that they have an emotional attachment to certain things or concepts. An example is if they want to focus one a specific keyword for search. But often you should remove emotion and look at the data. Maybe the keyword you're emotionally attached to is not the best keyword for you. If you look at the data, there could be another and better keyword to focus on. You should pick based on data, not emotion. Do the research, look at the data, and make a decision after removing the emotion. — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups. — Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, an

A long time ago when Erik was working at his first software development company, he was the manager over about 6 developers. When he first started, everything was going well but as time went on, he started to hear grumblings about this facility they’d invested in in Dallas, TX. It was huge but they were only occupying about a quarter of it. The company had over-invested in a facility because they’d anticipated a very large contract but that contract never came. That was a really big lesson for Erik because even though it didn’t affect him directly, it affected his company and it taught him that you should not be obligating resources with your own money if you don’t have an obligation from a client that’s not going to support you. This issue lingered at the company for months so Erik went to his supervisor and asked that he give him a heads up if there were ever layoffs. Well, a couple of weeks went by and he tells Erik “Today’s the day. We’re laying off most of your staff except two, you and one other perso

We measure many KPIs on a weekly basis, and several of them revolve around social media. For our own brands - Kevin, Erik, and Array Digital - our goal is to post 70 times per week. We've posted as many as 196 some weeks. This quarter we changed our KPIs to be more granular. We track social media followers with our quarterly goal being an audience of 25,500 and we're well on our way to reaching that stretch goal. We also now track social media impressions with a goal of over 55,000 impressions. We set goals that are high. What goals are you setting to expand your social media footprint? Instead of just tracking one post at a time, try to figure out your overall social media impact. — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups. — Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & ent

We’ve talked in the past about Marketers Anonymous, our meetup that started in Norfolk, VA that is an excellent networking opportunity for local marketers. We expanded into Newport News and Orlando. Why Orlando? Well, at one point we had two clients there and we also have two employees, web designers, that work down there. So at one point, we thought it would be a really good idea to make new connections and meet other marketers in that area; Marketers Anonymous was a great way to do that! Erik still thinks it’s a decent plan but the execution of said plan just fell flat. We pulled Marketers Anonymous out of Orlando altogether. It was extremely difficult to break into a new market when we didn’t know anyone and we were just basically dropping in once a month. Erik had a theory that you could build a network remotely, you didn’t actually have to be physically in the place. But he wasn’t able to expand his network beyond those initial contacts because he simply wasn’t around. Think about your current networ

Do you have any tools you feel like you’re “supposed” to use but don’t? Or any processes you’re “supposed” to follow but you really don’t? We certainly do here at Array Digital and Erik has had this problem for basically his whole career. And a lot of times you’re paying for these tools...and they’re not cheap. He’s noticed this cycle where we have a shiny new tool in front of us and we buy the subscription and we use the crap out of it for the first couple of weeks then we just fall out of the habit of using it regularly. Kevin recently did an episode about Hubspot which we’re paying $500/month for a plan that we’re not using. And so we’re going to cut it when we reach the 1-year ending of our subscription and drop back to the free one. Same thing with processes: we have processes galore here, so much so that we get overwhelmed with the number of processes and forget that they even exist. We take the time to write up these extensive processes and we recreate it or do it another way. This happens all t

When Erik was a 2-man shop, he worked pretty much non-stop. Every once in a while, his family or someone would interrupt wanting to do something non-work-related. One particular Saturday, he went to the movies with his family, finishing up some code right before they set out. And as he was sitting in this dark movie theater surrounded by his family, he realized that he might have done something wrong, injecting a bug that he didn’t realize. He went out into the hall, checked his phone and sure enough, the website was down and it had been down for about an hour and a half. And luckily no one had noticed or alerted the company of the website being down, but the website was down for a total of 3 hours before he was able to get home and fix it. So he got home and got the website back up and running but it made him realize that he needed help. He needed someone who would assure the quality of the work he was putting out. He had another coder at the time and was worried she may have been doing the same thing so

In episode 270 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik discusses contracts, monthly recurring revenue, and the details that have helped us communicate our scope of work to clients. When we sign with someone at Array Digital, we put a lot of effort upfront into the client and engagement. That upfront cost is amortized over the minimum commitment duration of the contract. When a client cancels early, it’s a problem because we do not have the time we expected to earn the revenue to offset our upfront costs. As an example, every other web agency will charge an upfront fee of $5k - $20k or more to create a website. Not at Array Digital - we charge the same amount every month even when we’re putting a ton of work in at the beginning of the project. But, there’s a minimum number of months that we expect the client to stay with us. When a client breaks the contract, when they cancel before the minimum commitment is fulfilled, then, contractually, there will be liquidated damages. Instead of trying to figure out what tho

Being an entrepreneur is risky. You give up stability. You may fail. You may not be able to pay yourself. But, it can also be rewarding; potentially unlimited pay, time with family, and full control of your destiny. What risks are you taking to grow your company? In April 2019, we hired Glen to be our Sales Manager. We didn’t have the cash on hand to pay his salary long term, so we had to calculate the risk of hiring him. We calculated that the worst-case scenario was that we could lose up to $60,000 if he didn’t sell anything. In order to hire him, we had to assume that risk and then manage him and the outcomes to try to reduce that risk as much as possible. It worked out, and the worst case of that risk was not realized, but we took the risk nonetheless. Sometimes you have to take a risk to get ahead. Are you taking enough risk to make it happen? — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100

In episode 268 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik answers a question asked of him on Twitter by Stuart Crane, the CEO of Voice Metrics. His question was: “What makes an effective sales funnel and landing page?” Erik stresses that you have to keep in mind that you must bring value to people, even if you’re designing an online system. There are four steps to funnels. 1. Awareness: It takes seven to fourteen times before people even recognize that your business exists. You need to get in front of people through networking, social media, and any other way you can get individuals to know who you are. 2. Engagement: Once they know you exist, you have to engage with them. Ask questions. Have a conversation. Be interested in what they have to say. 3. Interest: With online sales, the goal is to direct people to a landing page. At this point, you’re pitching them, but what you’re selling is just to visit the landing page. The promise has to be that the landing page will provide more value in the thing they’re inte

In episode 267 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin talks about the connector style of leadership. Connectors naturally interact with others - they connect with others. This is a leadership style that Kevin can relate to. Kevin is a people person who likes to have a good time and he’ll talk to anyone for any reason. When he started his company, he didn’t know anyone so he would go to networking events in order to meet new people. When at networking meetings Kevin doesn’t sell to people. He just talks to them genuinely, and at some point, they’ll ask what he does. When they express interest in what he does, then there could be a business connection and opportunity. One thing Kevin wants to do better is to leverage the network that he’s built over the years. His friend Zack Miller stresses this often to Kevin. He needs to create a process to leverage that network. The network is powerful, but only when that network is activated! — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Fou

It took a long time for Erik and Array Digital to get to $1 million, and that was only after a merger of two companies. In total, it took 10 years for Erik to go from $0 to $1 million in annual revenue. Only 4% of companies make it to $1 million in annual revenue. So a whopping 96% of companies never make it to $1 million, but want to. Knowing that statistics, when Erik recently spoke to a group of newer entrepreneurs titled, he titled his talk: Journey to $1 Million. That talk will become the basis for a book that Erik plans to publish in 2020. To help work through the stories and clarify the lessons learned, Erik has created a table of contents about Array Digital’s journey to $1 million. Future episodes of this podcast will expand on that table of contents and flesh out the details of each of the steps, and missteps, along the way. He’ll recount the learnings acquired, sometimes painfully, during the journey. Those recordings will then serve as inputs into the writing that will be done for the book.

Do you lead your team with a participative or democratic leadership style? In episode 264 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin explains the difference between these two leadership styles, and which he personally prefers. As a participative leader, you are letting your team input their thoughts and taking those thoughts into the decision-making process. A democratic leadership style would be having your team take a vote and then whichever vote wins is what the decision will be, regardless of anyone’s gut feeling. Kevin considers himself a participative leader. He wants everyone to have a voice most of the time. Collaboration is one of our core values here at Array Digital and team input is very valuable to us. It is important to Kevin that our team feels that they are able to alter the course we are headed in! Kevin encourages business owners to lead with a participative approach instead of a democratic or directive. The power of the room is more powerful than just Kevin and Erik on their own. What are you d